People use a cooling apparatus to keep drinks or food items at temperatures lower than the surrounding environment. Using cooling apparatuses is commonly associated with recreational activities including picnicking, tailgating at sporting events, barbeques and going to the beach. Using cooling apparatuses allows a user to keep an item stored within at a cooler than ambient temperature for a longer period of time.
Existing coolers have numerous forms, varying shapes and sizes. The traditional cooler, typically has an insulated rectangular volumetric receptacle and a removable or hinged door for access to the items stored within.
The volumetric capacity provided by some coolers often exceeds a user's need. This is burdensome to the user, and a cooler with large amounts of unused volume is inefficient. Not only is transport inefficient, but the cooling efficiency suffers, resulting in a cooler which does not stay cool as long. The cooling inefficiency is due to unused volume, or air-volume, having a lower specific heat value than pre-cooled items which are typically placed within a cooler, including full beverage containers, food-items, ice-packs and the like. A cooler that has pre-cooled items occupying the entirety of the internal volume, has a larger thermal mass than that of a cooler with unutilized internal volume. As a result, a cooler filled with pre-cooled items will keep items in the cooler colder for a longer period of time than a cooler with unused internal volume.
To overcome the cooling inefficiencies surrounding unused internal volume within a cooler, a user may fill the unused internal volume with more precooled items such as food items, beverage containers and ice-packs. This increases the thermal mass in relation to the volume within the cooler, which increases the efficiency of the cooler and serves to keep items placed in the cooler colder for a longer period of time. However, the drawback is that the user must then transport a cooler, which is too large for the application and heavier than otherwise necessary.
Existing coolers, such as U.S. Pat. No. 9,211,902 to Vanderberg, et al., incorporated in entirety by reference, employ wheels with a cooler for the increased portability of a cooler. However, transporting these coolers remain cumbersome and difficult, particularly when transporting the cooler across uneven surfaces such as grass or sand.
Existing solutions attempt to provide storage and cooling of only beverage containers in order to provide a smaller form-factor cooler, typically for beverage containers holding a 355 mL (12 Fluid Ounces) volume. Examples of such solutions include U.S. Pat. No. 8,991,600 to Normand (“the '600 patent”), U.S. Pat. No. 5,095,718 to Ormond (“the '718 patent”) and U.S. Pat. No. 3,263,806 (“the '806 patent”); each incorporated in their entirety by reference. Such solutions as the '600 patent, the '718 patent and the '806 patent provide more space efficient coolers with insulated structures for a user who wishes to only transport beverage containers. Where such solutions fail surrounds a scenario in which a user wishes to transport beverage containers in conjunction with a secondary transportation device such as a such as a backpack, handbag or basket. The above cited references do not typically fit within a secondary transportation device and require a user to carry a both a cooler and a secondary transportation device.
To prevent carrying a separate cooler in addition to a secondary transportation devices, some users are left to place pre-cooled beverage containers into a non-insulated transportation device that they are already carrying. It will be appreciated by those skilled in the art that in such scenarios, the beverage containers will warm up, reaching a thermal equilibrium with the surrounding environment at a much faster rate than a beverage container placed within a cooler with pre-cooled objects.